4th person narration

In my new novella I experiment with point of view by developing a question—“Is there a 4th person narration?”—posed by Shanxing Wang in his extraordinary work, Mad Science in Imperial City(Futurepoem, 2005). In physics, the fourth dimension of space is time. In the context of string theory, where our universe is thought to be one of a wilderness of universes comprised of infinite dimensions of space and time that are made up of vibrating membranes of energy, I imagine 4th person narration as a site for considering narrative mode in relation to higher dimensions in physical reality. To intentionally and/or unintentionally engage in a narrative mode within or beyond the fourth dimension might be to read, write, or construct texts outside of time, or in all times, making nonlinearity and simultaneity points of view and spacetime a literary device.

Wang, a former mechanical engineer, is from China and now lives in New York. In 2008, during the Beijing Olympics, I spoke with him about Mad Science in Imperial City while teaching it in my Naropa graduate seminar, “The Imaginary Present,” named after a phrase by Alfred Jarry in his essay, “How to Construct a Time Machine.” Wang and I discussed the book, poetry and science, and his ongoing interest in table tennis, which I now see as integral to his understanding of spacetime, on and off the page. With his permission, I sampled sentences—the molecular matter of our conversation—and constructed a new sequence using table tennis as a model in what I thought of then as a nanotechnological form for a review I wrote of his book in an attempt at rethinking the conventions for how we respond to the work of others.

* * *

Amy Catanzano: I found Mad Science in Imperial City at the AWP Conference in New York City, read it on the airplane home, and felt like I never landed.

Shanxing Wang: I began to read the Wall Street Journal a week or so ago for the first time. I think I am witnessing the formation of a supermassive black hole right before my eyes.

AC: Also, the body: historical memory, the physical markers of memory, and the performance memory of both the athlete and the writer.

SW: Like the much-hunted dark matter which shapes the large-structure of the universe? Then what is visibility?

AC: Do all galaxies (and poems) have supermassive black holes at their centers?

SW: If only you are in a techno session or a real table tennis team tournament.

AC: I saw on your blog that the Large Hadron Collider is going operational in a few days.

SW: My experience tells me that thinking and dreaming seem to be more quantum-mechanical while memory is more classical.

AC: We thought about the surface of water never being ruffled.

SW: Before 2002, I never dared to dream to be a poet.

AC: “Is there a 4th person narration?”

SW: The quantum supercomputer must work at the center of the supermassive black hole to battle its singularity. This is just my conjecture.

AC: You subvert the realism of scientific inquiry by integrating it with personal, political, and historical contexts.

SW: Science seems to be the true progressive and impact-making force in the modern world, in addition to some arts.

AC: One student introduced vectors and differentials.

SW: Yes, as you observe or write about them, you change them inevitably.

AC: Your book made me reconsider image, that the equation is an image, too.

SW: The gendered human body can be a fascinating thing, manifested in modern dance, body arts, and pornography.

AC: A writer constructs gravity.

SW: Poetry mediates between parallel universes of the physical, personal, social, political, artistic, poetic, linguistic, philosophical. It is in and not in all of them. The poetic object/subject and poetic spacetime emerge from them.

AC: Like you Jarry uses equations (for the “surface of God” and other “imaginary solutions”).

SW: I am obsessed now with the relationship between critique and lyric.

AC: I feel this, too.

SW: My favorite player lost in the semi-final. He got second Bronze in Men’s Single.

AC: Your pressing present?

SW: What are we when we are reading poetry? This is a great question. We are living to the fullest extent when we are reading great poetry, maybe even more than writing, which is a hard fight all the time.

AC: At tremendous speeds.

SW: I always feel I have to fight at least on two fronts at the same time.

AC: What are the attributes that make a table tennis player a favorite?

SW: That also speaks of the speaker in relation to characters and community and construction of the struggling subjectivity.

SW: As I wrote somewhere in the book, Something didn’t really happen unless we can write about it. Happening is not just an instant in the historical sense but an infinite process/period for us to bear all its consequences (and causes). And this process constitutes our subjectivity. Think about our first love. Think about our lost love.

AC: Speed and time. She/he identity (te).

SW: Writing seems to be the best way if not the only way to know it. Not just “an aid to memory.”

AC: But I am also interested in the hard science.

SW: Technically it’s speed and accuracy.

AC: You say the inventor of the word “quark” came up with the spelling from Finnegans Wake.

SW: At the highest level, table tennis is about the quickness and strength of the mind, but a well-trained and fit body is a prerequisite.

AC: A student talked about wanting to communicate and called it “reclamation.”

SW: Poems can definitely be constructed based on forms of nanotechnology.

AC: How can narration be conceptualized in the higher dimensions of the multiverse?

SW: Does a poem have a supermassive black hole? This is work-in-progress.

QUANTUM POETICS: Some of my work as a poet and fiction writer of cross-genre forms explores the historical and contemporary intersections of literature and science, particularly theoretical physics but also biotechnology, cosmology, genomics, and beyond. For this commentary series, I will write as a ’pataphysical correspondent, speculative documentarian, and poetry informant, reporting on largely under-acknowledged questions about literature and science and drawing from quantum poetics, where I apply principles in the natural sciences to poetry and prose. My commentaries will consist of field reports; explorations of literary movements such as conceptual poetry, post-confessional poetry, and visual poetry in relation to quantum poetics; and discussions about poems, books, and authors who seem to be working—consciously or without intent—from concepts in relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, and more.

Jumping off from two previous projects, my four-part essay, “Quantum Poetics: Writing the Speed of Light,” published by Jerome Rothenberg on Poems and Poetics, and a collaborative discussion project about poetry and science titled Like A Metaphor in which I participated with Gilbert Adair, Rae Armantrout, John Cayley, Tina Darragh, Marcella Durand, Allen Fisher, the late James Harvey, Peter Middleton, Evelyn Reilly, and Joan Retallack, I will discuss writing that uses science in metaphor but also writing that moves beyond reference alone by employing what Retallack calls “the dynamics of scientific modeling” in procedure and composition. One of my aims is to challenge practitioners of literature and science to conceive of their work and consider the work of others through a wider, wilder, transdisciplinary responsiveness to the contemporary milieu.

AMY CATANZANO is the author of three books: Starlight in Two Million: A Neo-Scientific Novella (Noemi Press, 2014), recipient of the Noemi Press Book Award for Fiction; Multiversal (Fordham University Press, 2009), selected by Michael Palmer for the Poets Out Loud Prize and recipient of the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry; and iEpiphany (Erudite Fangs Editions, 2008). She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and taught for many years in Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Originally from Boulder, Colorado, she is an Assistant Professor and serves as Director of the Creative Writing Program at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

*

Jacket2Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.